Hades' Melody. JD Belcher
when addressing a well reputed, old-fashioned preacher—and as a result, ending up with a smack across his soft, three-year-old face.
Either way, when Tre came back into the living room with George’s pink handprint on his cheek and ton-sils vibrating from his frantic lamentation, my mother jumped to attention, and darted down the hallway to find out what had happened. I heard it all from the piano: Grandma unsuccessfully trying to resolve the matter in her usual, humble, peacemaking fashion, my mother snapping away at George, demanding that he keep his hands off her damn child, and George wanting both of them out of his way, probably en route to the bathroom for a bit of solace.
But my mother wasn’t having any of that— no, George had to pay for hitting her son. She quickly and briefly appeared at my side—I immediately stopped practicing my chords and made a 180 degree turn on the piano bench toward the television in the living room—
and I saw her lift one of the heavy candlestick holders from the dining room table. What transpired next, I would remember for the rest of my life. The arguing turned up a notch, and I peeked my head around the corner and down the hallway to get a glimpse of the action. After I looked—for whatever reason, I didn’t want to experience it all live, in real time—I turned back to AJ, who continued to watch television on the couch, and the first thought that entered my mind had been how very strange it was to see all those people in the hallway. There were too many of them, not just Grandma and George and my mother, but three others, wearing red and white robes from neck to foot. One stood beside my mother, whose raised arm with candlestick in vii
hand at any moment might have come crashing down atop George’s head; another behind George, who was bent over my grandmother, just seconds before pushed out of his way to the floor; and the last, kneeling near Grandma, as if checking to make sure she was all right.
When I took a double take, they were gone.
The next thing I knew, Mom came storming in from the hallway crying, telling us to gather our belongings and head to the car. She picked up the phone and dialed the police. All the while, I couldn’t get the image of the people with the red and white clothes out of my mind.
When we all finally settled into the car out in the driveway, windshield wipers slamming back and forth and my mother exclaiming to us how she wanted so badly to hit him, and had even tried with all her might, yet her arm wouldn’t move, like someone had been holding it back—a sight I clearly remembered seeing—I finally spoke up. With my ten-year-old intellect, I explained how I saw the other people in the hallway, and that I thought they were angels. Even at my young age, it all made sense to me—George’s life had been spared. She surely would have killed the old man with the heavy candlestick holder. My mother might have gone to jail for murder, losing everything; her marriage, her children, her future. When the police showed up, they asked my grandma if she wanted George to leave. She said no.
Instead, Mom drove us back to Pittsburgh and wouldn’t return to Fort Wayne for another two years. The story spread throughout the family, and from then on, I was known as the child who saw the angels.
CHAPTER ONE
Summer 1996.
The first time I smoked marijuana was on the balcony of a 10th floor Camp Hall dorm room at the University of Alabama–Birmingham, with a black guy named Muhammad. He opened a small plastic bag—about the size of a cotton ball—tied so tight at the top that he had to bite it open with his teeth. It was packed with moist green herbs. At the time, I knew nothing of drugs and had no idea what he planned to do with the package of Phillies Blunt cigars he placed on my dining room table.
“Yeah, boy!” he said, with the one of the heaviest Southern accents I had ever heard in my northeastern Yankee ears, after taking a deep whiff of the weed. “I done got us some shit.”
Two years earlier, I had smoked cigars with Brian, my hometown buddy and former roommate in that same dormitory at UAB. He showed up with a pack of Swisher Sweets, bought from a small convenience store on Tenth Avenue South.
“Let’s light up in celebration of our arrival to college,” Brian had said proudly. “It has been a long hard road.”
We filled our room with smoke, and it was the very first time I had gotten a real buzz from smoking anything. After two semesters, Brian left Birmingham and went back to Pittsburgh. He always complained that UAB didn’t have the undergraduate programs he needed to prepare him for med school, so he decided to transfer back home and enroll at Pitt. I’d be spending my first summer away from home alone.
Before I graduated high school, I received letters from colleges and universities all over the country, advertising their school as the place I should attend for academic and athletic purposes. On my first collegiate sports visit, I traveled down to Alabama A&M to meet the basketball coach and team. Since I had grown up with my divorced mother up north, I thought Alabama to be an ideal location. I could be closer to my father—who worked contract jobs as an electrical engineer in various places around the continental US and finally settled in Decatur—and experience a taste of some Southern hospitality. After an indecisive visit, I still felt the need to pursue my Division I basketball dream by walking on at the larger and more prominent UAB. I was accepted as an undergraduate, but after the tryouts, I didn’t make the team. Though I had game, they weren’t in need of six-foot, one-inch point guards. They wanted six-foot nine-inch forwards.
After abandoning my athletic aspirations, I settled into the role of being a normal student, and got a job as a bike messenger, delivering for the Office of the Vice President for Financial Affairs and Administration at UAB for about two years. When I wasn’t in class, I’d ride through the streets of Birmingham and saunter through the corridors and catwalks of the gargantuan hospital conglomeration, picking up and dropping off mail. But that time was coming to an end because my days at UAB were numbered. I didn’t know it, but I would soon be roommates with Brian again.
I watched Muhammad split a cigar down the middle with a knife and dump out the dry, brown tobacco on the table. I thought about how it looked much like the mulch I used to lay when I worked as a landscaper for Deauville Park Apartments while in high school. The pieces of leaves easily crumbled in his hand. He took the empty wrapper from the cigar, put it in his mouth, and wet it with his tongue. It was disgusting, the way he licked it and all.
“That’s nasty,” I told him, and he smirked.
He continued until the entire rectangular sheet was moist, and then finally set it on the table. When he poured the contents of the bag into the leaf, he made an even line down the middle.
Next, I watched him perform the tricky part, the craft that took me years to master. He rolled the blunt, twist-ing it between his fingers and lips until he was able to turn it back into a smaller cylindrical version of the original cigar. He took a lighter from his pocket and dried the wet spit on the wrapping, waving the flame back and forth along its surface until it became hard and stiff.
We went to the balcony and stared at the many university buildings and hospitals before us, and gazed off into the dawning horizon of the downtown Birmingham skyline. A hawk circled in the distance as we slowly passed the blunt back and forth to each other, inhaling deeply. I coughed incessantly but continued to smoke the little cigar until it became so tiny and hot that it couldn’t be held any longer. When it burned the tips of my thumb and forefinger, I threw the stub off the balcony.
At first, I didn’t know if it had worked or not. I wasn’t sure if I had been elevated to the high place I imagined the marijuana would take me; that was, until the jokes Muhammad were telling began to seem funnier than usual.
“Mane,” Muhammad said the word man so that it sounded like mane, like a lion’s mane, “One time I got so high, I thought a tree started talkin’ to me.”
I laughed harder and louder than I normally did, lov-ing